Nat Turner on Understanding Analytics Within Practices

Practices now should have at least 1 person who understands analytics, as their prevalence and importance grows in the field, explained Nat Turner, co-founder and CEO of Flatiron Health.

Transcript (slightly modified)

A few years ago, most physician practices were largely overwhelmed by the amount of data they were receiving. Are they getting any better at understanding these analytics?

I would say that’s still largely true, unfortunately, because the need for analytics has gotten bigger so not only are practices expanding their skills, but the world around them is getting more complicated. Oncology Care Model, I think, probably has a large part to do with that. Two-sided risk and other things that are looming are making them think about things ahead of time, which is nice.

The tools have gotten better, certainly Flatiron, but there are others that are providing good tools for analytics. Practices are getting smarter; I mean we’ve seen practices now hire CIOs or informatics people. Five years ago, when we started Flatiron, that was very rare, if ever did we see that. That’s really helping and I think that there is just a general acceptance that analytics is a thing now that you have to have. It’s not optional, you have to have someone in the practice at least who logs into analytics with whatever software they’re using. I think it’s getting better but it’s still pretty complicated.